Re: Another Raspberry Pi data point

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 09:06:06PM +0000, Richard Huxton wrote:
> I saw Jonathan Marsden's post the other day, but wasn't subscribed then, so
> this will have to be another data point.

Thanks for the report!

> Guix seems to work well for applications on top of both debian and alpine
> containers as the "foreign" O.S. There are fewer pre-built substitutes for
> 64-bit arm than x86 of course, but that is to be expected. Likewise,
> build-time can be a bit long on a Raspberry Pi.

Substitute availability should start to improve somewhat, as we've made
some changes in the build farm that will avoid some "spurious" build
failures with aarch64. In the long run, we are hoping to acquire more
aarch64 hardware to match the growing demand.

> I had no success with building a vm or disk image - a build would take hours
> and then fail trying to assemble the boot subsystem, seemingly having
> switched to x86 architecture. This was despite all my debugging attempts
> seeming to show that the guile scripts were aware this was a 64-bit arm
> architecture for most of their run.

Hm, that's a bug :/

> My eventual aim was to try and create lxc/lxd containers via guix, but step
> 1 of that was to get a VM working. I shall have another attempt in a few
> weeks. Part of my problem may just be that I am unfamiliar with arm boot
> setups.

It might help if you shared the config.scm you used for creating your vm
images.

> So - as of the start of 2021, on top of a foreign distro Guix works fine on
> a Raspberry Pi. If you are reading by the end of 2021 I suspect it will work
> in any of the scenarios described in the docs.

Let's make it happen!